Pride of a Hunter

by Sylvie Kurtz

  “You think?” Luci shuddered at the gossip that could spread.

  “Positive.”

  “About the prenuptial—”

  Jill leaned back, crossing her arms. “I trust Warren.”

  “I know you do. But there’s Jeff.”

  Irritation crimped Jill’s forehead. “Jeff’s future is secure. J.J. made sure of that. I love Warren and he loves me. This is the real thing, Luci. We’re going to grow old together.”

  Luci sighed. There was no winning this. Jill wasn’t going to realize her mistake until it was too late. Luci wished she could spread all the evidence on the table and show Jill what kind of man Warren was, show her how he wooed and hurt all those other women, how he’d left them heartbroken and broke—and two of them dead. But if she did, Warren would bolt, and she would be responsible for his next victim. All they needed was a few more days to figure out Amber’s role in the scam, corner her and get her to testify against Warren. “That he’s asking you for money before the wedding worries me.”

  Jill’s chin cranked up defensively. Her gaze narrowed. “How do you know that?”

  Shrugging, Luci covered her slip with a lie. “Mom mentioned something about it.”

  Jill blew out a breath that ruffled her bangs. “Does no one in this family mind their own business?”

  Luci noticed Dom ambling over to the bar a couple of tables down and ordering a round of soda. A worried look crossed his face. Luci ignored it and focused on soothing her sister. “We love you, Jill. We all want what’s best for you.”

  Jill’s manicured nail drilled into the table. “Then accept Warren. He is the best. If you must know, that money is my wedding gift to him.” Her face lit up with pleasure. “I’m buying him the boat of his dreams. He’s going to teach me how to sail.” She skewered Luci with a cutting scowl. “Just because J.J. didn’t know how good he had it doesn’t mean all men who fall for me are fools. Or that I can’t find someone who loves me for me, not my bank account.”

  “I didn’t mean—”

  “But you’re hurting me anyway, Luci.” Each of Jill’s words got tighter, sharper. “Warren’s going to be my husband. I’m going to take care of him as well as he takes care of me. That’s what married people do.” Her voice rose to a high, thin blade as she plunked her napkin on her plate. “At least I didn’t kill my own husband.”

  The bells on the pinball machine jangled. Silverware clanged out of tune. A tray of glasses crashed in the kitchen. Every face at the surrounding tables turned in her direction. Every one of them etched with a mixture of horror and morbid curiosity.

  No, she wanted to shout. It was an accident. I didn’t kill him. I waited too long. Still my fault, but not my bullet. It’s not the same. I didn’t kill him.

  But that was a lie. Wasn’t that what she’d told herself all these years? That she’d killed Cole. That his death was her personal debt? All her training had prepared her, but when it had come to proving herself, she’d failed. If she hadn’t hesitated that extra fraction of a second, her first bullet wouldn’t have missed Grigsby and he’d have been dead at the time he shot Cole. As it was, by the time she hit him with her second bullet, he’d killed Cole and both his hostages. Their deaths weighed on her soul, too.

  She hadn’t squeezed the trigger—and that was the crux of it all. If she had, three innocent people would still be alive.

  Jill had not lied.

  Luci’s mistake had killed Cole.

  Her fault. Her failure. Her cross to bear.

  And as she watched all those faces watching her, shame burned. They would believe Jill. They would see Luci as a murderer. As desperately as she’d wanted to become part of Marston, part of the community, she now realized that she never had—not even as a child—and never would. Trying to fit into small-town life was proving to be just another disappointment.

  If she’d been an outcast before, the spilling of her secret would now make her a pariah.

  With slow, deliberate movements, Luci scraped back her chair, rose, turned on her heel and marched out of the restaurant and into the cold night.

  Chapter Twelve

  Dom rounded on Jill. Luci was putting her life on the line to save her sister and she shouldn’t have had to take a kick in the teeth like that from Jill. “You can be a real bitch, you know that. Luci didn’t kill Cole. My mistake did.”

  That’s why he’d stayed away for so long. He’d needed Luci’s forgiveness and was afraid she wouldn’t give it to him. He hadn’t known that she blamed herself for Cole’s death. All these years, he’d thought she’d couldn’t stand the sight of him because he wasn’t unable to defuse the situation, for letting it get too inflamed by the time the assault team was called in to put an end to the situation.

  He rounded up a protesting Brendan from the arcade and caught up with Luci at his truck. She sat stiffly all the way home, staring blankly out the window.

  She said nothing as they arrived, simply got out and headed toward what had once been her barn.

  Dom settled Brendan with Maggie in the living room, then sought out Luci. Silently he stood beside her, staring at the concrete on which she’d once built all her hopes.

  The chill in the air wasn’t from the bite of Septem ber wind, but from the howl of loss. After everything she’d lost this week in the barn fire, now the sister she was trying to help had hacked at the final piece of root tying her to Marston.

  Training was designed to make the trainee fail and to test how well he could overcome his own inadequacies. She’d gone through territory most people never probed—and had survived.

  Twice.

  She didn’t need any more tempering.

  He reached out for her, but she jerked her shoulder, refusing his support. His hand hung in midair for a moment, then he stuffed his fist in his jeans pocket.

  “Luci…I meant what I said about helping you rebuild.” They needed to talk about Cole, clear the air about his death and how it tortured them both. He loved her too much to let her bright inner flame go out completely. Words had always been his strong suit. Knowing when to talk, what to say to gain trust, calm tempers and end conflict.

  Except when he’d most needed those skills, he’d failed Cole—and Luci.

  “Talk to me,” he said, coaxing her as he’d tried to win over the man who’d killed her husband. Talk to me, Joe Bob. What’s going on here? Is everybody okay? “Jill should never have said what she did to you. She doesn’t know what happened. She shouldn’t judge.”

  Luci stepped away from him, arms wrapped around her middle as if she were holding herself together. “I missed my first shot.” Her voice was so devoid of life it scored him like a dull knife. “Less than a tenth of a second window of error. And I missed it.”

  “Grigsby was a mover—unstable and unpredictable. You couldn’t have predicted his movements.” But he should have. That was his job. When the demands got outrageous, when rapport was unraveling, he should’ve let go.

  “I want a million dollars in cash. A helicopter to fly me to Mexico.” Grigsby screamed his demands, his voice seeming to sweat blood with his heightening anxiety.

  “Okay, now we’re talking. Getting those things here is going to take time. You’ve gotta give us some time, Joe Bob.”

  “No more talking. I get out or no one gets out. I want it now.”

  “And I want to help you. I’m on your side. The bank’s closed right now. It takes at least twenty minutes to fly a copter out here. And about two hours to access that kind of money. Give me a chance to get you what you want.”

  “Just get it here or I’m going to kill the bitch. I’m going to kill the kid.”

  Luci’s hollow voice reached through his memories. “No one asks you how you made a shot.” She rubbed opposite arms against a chill that was seven years old. “All anyone ever cares about is why you missed.”

  Her pain wrapped around his heart, squeezed it painfully, and threw him back to that run-down shack, to his desperation to end the sit
uation peaceably.

  “Joe Bob, come on, talk to me. What did you take? How much? I’m trying to help you, but you’ve gotta give me something to work with. I’ve got my boss on the line. He’s looking into the helicopter. But he’s going to want something in exchange to show your good faith. You send out the boy, you get you some wheels. That sound good to you?”

  Dom had tried to keep Grigsby on the phone, to keep him talking. The passage of time, he’d been taught, often gave a hostage taker the chance to vent his anger and frustration, a chance to feel listened to. But he’d screwed up. He’d hadn’t been able to connect with Grigsby, hadn’t been able to talk him down. Hadn’t been able to reason him into releasing the hostages. The Special Operations Group leader had suggested they try another negotiator, but Dom was convinced that with a little more time he could establish the needed rapport with Grigsby.

  But Grigsby threw out the phone. He was done talking, done looking for a solution.

  “Luci, Cole’s death wasn’t your fault. We should have gone in sooner. By the time Grigsby threw out the phone, he was too high on drugs, too unpredictable.”

  Grigsby had strapped a rifle to his ex-girlfriend so that if she moved, she would kill herself. He’d wrapped the kid around him like live body armor. The leader had sent in the assault team.

  Pop. Pop. Pop. The echo of Grigsby’s three shots resounded in Dom’s brain as if they were happening now. Faster than a thought and three people were dead. Then Luci’s shot—boom—and it was all over.

  Blood and failure stained the ground.

  Dom had joined the team for justice, for a cause, to save lives. Making the cut, training and the successes that came after all bred a certain feeling of invincibility. That illusion shattered the day Cole died.

  For all these years, he’d thought Luci’s forgiveness would free him. The truth was that he couldn’t forgive himself.

  “Cole died because I wasn’t accurate enough,” Luci insisted. The breeze fingered her hair the way Dom wished she’d let him.

  The thick skin of guilt skewed her perception. “That’s bull and you know it. You were good, Luci. Damned good. Grigsby would’ve killed a lot more of the team if you hadn’t stopped him.” He took in a deep breath and spewed out the words he’d needed to tell her for seven years. “And if you want to play the blame game, then Cole died because I couldn’t talk Grigsby into giving up peaceably.”

  A short sob ripped out of her. “Talk wasn’t going to work with him. He had nothing to lose.”

  “But we all did.” Needing to touch her and reassure her, Dom risked another rejection and wrapped his arms around her and pulled her to his chest.

  She looked up at him, her green eyes full of tears. In them, he could see the pieces of her heart and wanted desperately to glue them back together.

  “Cole’s dead,” she choked out, acceptance a hard pill to swallow. “He’s never coming back.”

  He kissed the top of her head. “Letting yourself die doesn’t help him. Or you and Brendan.”

  “I loved him.”

  “I know. I loved him, too.”

  She pivoted her head until it lay on his shoulder. Her hands spread on his chest and his heart beat into her palms. Dom wanted to stop her pain, stop the destruction, stop the memories.

  “Being with Cole,” she said, the choke of feelings raw as if she’d turned herself inside out, “it was like plugging straight into high-voltage current. I needed that then. After trying to fit a square peg into a round hole all of my life, having the freedom to fly was exhilarating. He pushed me out of my comfort zone.” She swallowed hard against his shoulder. “And you were the solid rock that kept me grounded when Cole took me too high, too fast. I needed that, too.” She shook her head, the rest of the words she needed to release caught in the crush of her closing throat. “When I lost him, I lost part of myself.”

  She’d shut herself off and gone for safe, even if it wasn’t her nature. “It’s time you found it again,” he whispered hoarsely.

  Time they both did.

  “I thought I’d found myself here.” Her gaze went to the eerie glow of concrete in moonlight. “Being here, working the farm, raising Brendan, that kept me out of the black hole Cole’s death took me into.” She lifted her head and met his gaze. “Then you came.”

  “And brought it all back.” Making him wish he’d never heard of Swanson and his scheme.

  Confusion flitted across her eyes. “Something in me is coming back to life, Dom. And it scares me.”

  And suddenly, so was he because, for the first time in a long time, hope sang through him and made him dizzy. Hope that she could come to accept a future with him. Hope that he could give her what she needed to restore happiness in her life. Hope that they could put Cole’s ghost behind them. “Then we’ll take it slow and easy.”

  He kissed her gently, tenderly, then nudged her toward the house and the soft halo of light surrounding it, holding on to her hand, knitting his fingers with hers. As they stepped into the kitchen the sounds of Brendan’s laughter and Maggie’s barks greeted them. “One step at a time. We’ll figure it out.”

  FROM THE COCOON OF HIS CAR, Warren watched them through binoculars. Kissing like that when a child was nearby. Didn’t they know the damage such a sight could cause a child?

  She’d done that to him. Brought men home, seduced them. Did she think he was deaf? That he couldn’t hear the bed banging against the wall, her moans, her lover’s grunts?

  This is the one, she’d always said. Meet your new daddy. The first one had shown up on his seventh birthday. But each man had never stayed more than a night. Why should they have when she’d given herself away so freely?

  Then she’d done just as Jill had done yesterday—freely used the money she was supposed to spend on her son’s welfare to make herself more attractive to another horny bull who only wanted a night of release.

  She’d deserved what had happened to her.

  They all did.

  THE CLOUD THAT WAS WARREN still hung over Luci, but as she cleaned up the breakfast dishes on Monday morning, she could see blue skies ahead. The thought stuck her with a new dart of fear. Soft blue. Like Dom’s eyes. Was she crazy for hoping that he really did love her? Or was she, like Jill, simply setting herself up for heartache when he left?

  One day at a time. Dom was right. Given the circumstances, that was all they could hope for. Right now, they needed to concentrate on Warren and Amber. Then they’d see if there was something more between them than obligation to a dead friend.

  “We’ve got her,” Dom said as he came into the kitchen, his voice animated. “We’ve got Amber.”

  “The fingerprints paid off?” Luci forgot about the pancake griddle in the sink and joined Dom at the table.

  He slapped down the small notebook he carried and took a chair. “Big time. Her real name is Davina Pedley. She’s from Merritt Island, Florida. She was arrested when she was eighteen for pulling a bank-examiner type scam. She was working as an aide for an elderly woman who was sick and living alone and conned her out of her life’s savings.”

  Luci sat beside him and tension knitted itself into her muscles. “How much time did she serve?”

  “None.”

  She frowned. “How can that be?”

  “Amber returned the money. The victim refused to press charges.”

  “That’s crazy.” Luci batted her braid over her shoulder. “She could have lost her life’s savings. Did Amber’s accomplices get caught?”

  Dom scoffed. “Amber said she worked alone.”

  “Don’t you need three people to make that kind of scam work?”

  He glared at his notes. “She was working as an aide, so she answered the phone, took messages, ran errands, made meals. When Amber told Maude Rosenfeld that the bank was concerned someone was tapping into her account, Mrs. Rosenfeld trusted Amber with her account information. Amber took out the money herself, using Mrs. Rosenfeld’s signed authorization, and would have got
ten away with it if Mrs. Rosenfeld hadn’t told her son about her close call. He called the police, who nabbed Amber. Lucky for us, she was booked.”

  Luci popped up from her chair, refilled her coffee cup and let the shot of caffeine fire her brain cells. “Tapping into accounts. That’s what Warren does. And that motel room in Texas where Laynie McDaniels died was in a woman’s name.” She plunked her cup on the counter untouched, energy stirring through her blood. “That’s it. Maybe Amber’s the brains behind the scam. Maybe the name on the register is one of Amber’s aliases. Where’s your file?”

  He jerked his head toward his bedroom. And for the briefest of moments, Luci wished he’d follow her there. She found the file in his briefcase beside the futon and dug it out.

  “Either way,” Dom said when she returned and set the briefcase on the table, “we need something big enough on one of them to make them crack. I’m going to make some phone calls. We’ll need as much on Amber as we can and see where it leads.”

  “We’re getting somewhere. I can feel it.” Luci glanced at the clock on the stove and with a sigh of exasperation she went to the stairs. “Brendan, hurry up with that book bag. We’re going to be late.” She turned back to Dom, a list forming in her mind. “I’m going to drop Brendan off at school. I’ll see if Jill will pick him up after school so I don’t have to worry about my meeting with Amber running over if it’s going well. That’ll also keep Jill away from the fitness center.” One hand tapped the archway. “We’re going to get Amber. Today.”

  DOM MISSED LUCI as soon as she’d left. Even those few minutes without her filled him with a strange kind of emptiness. Over the years, he’d tried to convince himself he didn’t love her, that if he truly had, he’d have fought for her, that he would have stuck around even after she’d sent him away. Irrational, stupid, wrong. But to go on without her, he’d needed the doubts. In those moments when he was honest with himself, he could admit he loved her and had never stopped loving her.